Monday you were burying your first cousin. His heart gave out at forty-two. What you had of the first day came through Micah: the homework he sent you on the four-hour layover in Las Vegas, then the words from the book. You read about the disease and recognized yourself before you ever walked in.

The foundation they lay on the first day is the same foundation you heard taught live to the young people Tuesday night: violence as a disease, the germs, the symptoms. So you did get it. You got it a day late and from the back of the room.

Wisdom versus game. Dr. Marshall opened with his go-to: "Don't take a knife to a gunfight" sounds wise, but it is game. It still has a knife, a gun, and a fight in it. Wisdom says don't fight at all. He said he grew up on game thinking it was wisdom, and did not know the difference until he heard real wisdom.

Coachisms as pills. Short words of wisdom they drill into the young people so something jumps into your head at the moment you are about to do something you will regret. They come from Coach, an assistant basketball coach at City College who sat in one night, asked to be part of it, and volunteered until he died. He went to every graduation on his own dime. Dr. Marshall's point: good information is good information no matter who it comes from.

The ones that landed on you. Say them as his. "One of Dr. Marshall's coachisms is..."

• You're only one bad decision away. His favorite. He says he wakes up and tells himself that every day, awards and all.
• Don't let your circumstances dictate your behavior. He handed this one straight to you after your testimony on Wednesday.
• Good advice plus a bad example causes confusion. You might get by, but you won't get away. His second favorite. This is "educated violence" in his words, not yours.
• You may not be able to do anything about the family you're in, but you can do everything about the family you start. You said "I like that one" out loud when he read it.
• We're not all related, but we're all family. There's nothing magical about sperm and eggs.
• Hurting people hurt people. Deal with your pain or it blows on somebody.
• How well you listen determines how long you live.
• What you spend your time doing is what you get good at.
• You can't do the right thing the wrong way. The classic: "I sell dope to feed my family." When you are in jail, who feeds your family?
• If you can't raise the children, what else matters. Number one job in the world is being a parent.
• Turn right and keep straight. No matter what you did before.
• What other people say about me is none of my business.
• Your gift will make room for you. Never give them a reason to say no.
• Some get it right away, some sooner or later, some never. We don't know who's who, so we give it to everybody.
• Listen to your background music.

The balloon. Dr. Marshall called this the hardest part of the prescription: the emotional residue of anger, fear, and pain that gets in you once you are infected. If you do not let it out, it blows on you or on somebody else. He has lost young people to that residue, not to the streets. He said the job is to teach people to manage what is in the balloon.

Three things filling the balloon now. Music, social media, and fathers. He said the young people themselves named social media and mental health as their biggest issues. The fathers issue has not changed in forty years.

Music. He did not argue it. He asked the room whether the way men, boys, women, and girls are shown in today's music and videos is healthy for our children. The room said no. He said then the discussion is over; you deal with unhealthy music the way you deal with unhealthy food. He called the whole industry "the perfect murder," because everybody is in on it for the money.

Social media. The only question is who is in control, it or you. The people who built it have said on camera they built a machine that watches, predicts, and manipulates, and that it runs on the same psychology as slot machines. He said the only thing that can save a young person from a machine is people, and the way in is to ask them what they think, not tell them what to think.

What you put in the room, as the technology man. The machine is your image. Every time you click "accept cookies," you tell an algorithm to show you what is profitable, not the people you love. Click "customize" instead. The machine wants one thing: for you to stay on. Technology is Pandora's box, the Indiana Jones kind. We opened it for power and got more than we can control. It is the radio, the TV, the car, just faster. Your word for it: moderation. Technology is not bad until it consumes everything about you. Same as any drug.

You and Micah stayed for the Tuesday night class instead of going to dinner. Micah wanted to leave. You said, "We're not going anywhere. I've been trying to figure this out for years." Before it started, you two shot around outside and you lit him up. That part is yours to tell.

What the teacher gave the young people.

• Violence is a disease. A prescription was born almost forty years ago to treat it.
• Four germs, no particular order: bad advice, bad example, bad instruction, bad information. That is how it spreads.
• Just because you have been exposed to the germs does not mean you have the disease. You look for symptoms.
• Symptoms she named: mean mugging, set tripping, in and out of jail, traveling in packs, and the most critical one, the commandments of violence, because that one deals with how you think.
• What you think is what you will become. Your brain does not understand what you don't want. Tell your brain what you want. If what you want doesn't scare you a little, dig deeper.
• Quiet the noise. That voice inside has to be heard before anything else, and that voice is God.
• Her favorite coachism: how well you listen determines how long you live.

Dr. Marshall's piece that night. He told the young people about the founder of the Crips, who said the thought of prison was planted in his head at eight years old from pictures of men lifting weights and smiling. His thinking drove him there. Your thinking determines where you end up. And the line he uses with every young person who shows up: "Give me your Tuesday night, and I'll give you the rest of your life."

Jack's message. The co-founder told the young people to look in the mirror that night and congratulate themselves for being in the right place on a Tuesday.

Your turn at the mic. Dr. Marshall called you and Micah up as guests. You told the young people where you came from and that you listened, you watched, and you knew something was not right, with no guidance, just tidbits. You told them there would be tidbits in their lives that are bad advice and they will not know it, but they will feel something that does not feel right. Follow that. Micah read his spoken word. That poem is his.

The ATM. Dr. Marshall said the training is like an ATM: the more you put into it, the more you get out. He said some people leave appreciating it, some leave transformed, and some leave transformed and ready to go. You want to be the third kind.

Fathers. His pet thing. For years every young person he sent to college came with a mother, an auntie, a grandmother, and no father. He asked them who the most important parent is, and almost nobody said both. The hardest show he does all year is the Father's Day show. He said: "Mom is going to be mom no matter what. I want men to be father no matter what." He has been divorced himself. His line to his ex: "I'm leaving you. I ain't leaving them." He said the hardest thing for a man is to be a father outside the house, because you lose access and have to humble yourself and invent ways.

What makes a good dad. A list the young people and the radio audience built: a teacher, leadership by example, protector, provider, balances sternness and sensitivity, gives organization and structure, kind, loving and supportive, calm, patient, understanding, listens, inspires, believes in you, and can express emotion. His own father taught him two things without saying a word: men work, and men take care of their kids.

If the relationship is broken or never existed. "Somebody has to take the first step. Without expectation." No guarantee it works. Start anyway.

When the men are right, the neighborhood is right. His direct appeal to the men in the room: stand up and be the fathers, because when that is in you, nobody comes in and does something crazy with your kids.

Background music. Mrs. Stell, who is Lady E on the air, taught it. How do you know in a movie that something bad is about to happen? The music changes. Everybody in the room had done something after a feeling said don't. That feeling is your background music. For young people it is a concept they can hold. For grown folks it is intuition. For her it is God guiding and protecting. Listen and obey.

The elders group. You have to be fifty, and you have to be invited. The marks of an elder: wisdom, grace, intelligence, and humility. Humility is the big one.

The village. He showed the African village before the slave ships. Being born is hard work; life is hard; his job is to make hard easier. Two words that society lived by: personal responsibility. The father does not punish the boy who lost the goat; he asks first if he is hurt, then says all men make mistakes, shows him his own scar from a lion, and gives him one rule: never run toward any dangerous animal. Then that is all that needs to be said. Dr. Marshall's point: most parents whoop and never say how not to make the mistake again. He has to have an answer for every single thing a young person brings him.

What he said back to you. After your testimony he said you have work to do, managing what is in your balloon, and while you work on it, that moment is going to come up, and in the back of your head: don't let your circumstances dictate your behavior. You're only one bad decision away.

You were the most put-together man in the room by the accolades and the material things. Bachelor's, two master's, a doctorate. Twenty-nine years married. Present father. Grandfather. And you started seeing the hourglass. We all have a certain amount of time here and you had never paid attention to it.

Where you come from, if you choose to say it. Odessa, West Texas. Mom bipolar, married seven times. Raised mostly by Big Mama. Homeless from fifteen to nineteen, couch surfing. Flunked your senior year. The only one in the family who wanted college, and everybody thought you were crazy for it. An uncle who shot another uncle. Aunts in the life. You said all of this in the room. You decide how much of it goes on open radio.

Also yours, but your call. The Whaley name. Your mother was going to end the pregnancy; your grandmother convinced a GI to adopt you so you would be born. Seven men before you learned who your father was, and he had already died. DNA found the Weems family, who had been looking for you since the seventies. Powerful. Not required.

You had little bitty breadcrumbs through the years and no vocabulary for what was happening to you. You could not articulate the roadmap to anybody else. You were the rose that grew from concrete and had no idea how, so you could not teach anybody else how.

How you got out, in your own telling: you listened, you watched, and you knew this was not right. No guidance, just tidbits. You watched television fathers to see what you were missing. Many people prayed for you. You call it blessed, not lucky.

Your whole life you thought there was a gap in you, something missing that made you feel you were not valuable to your family or to society. Then Dr. Marshall held up the balloon. There is no gap. You are full. You could not take in one more term, one more theory, one more map, because you were already filled with everything you never had a name for. You watched people in that room let their air out so they could receive more. You had not let anything out.

Dr. Marshall's answer to you in the moment: they have learned how to manage the stuff in the balloon. That is the next step. That is your work now.

Your signposts were your children. A family birthday party where you and a brother-in-law got into it over education and were about to step outside, in front of your daughter, your son, their spouses, and your grandson. Your daughter wanted a talk on the drive back. Your wife had one too. Then the funeral trip home, where you got aggressive with your own sisters in front of your son and your grandkids, back in the same neighborhood where you had used survival methods to get out. Your grown children had been asking, Dad, why are you so aggressive? You called it standing up for yourself. You did not know you were sick. You would stay healthy a while and get sick again, because you kept not taking your medicine.

Dr. Marshall's response in the room: like the dope dealers who sold out of the house instead of on the block. Your answer: "I was at the colleges, dishing out the same poison." Another brother in the room told you he was taking "educated violence" home with him. Your phrase landed.

Micah had been pointing you toward this since last year. You had been talking about it for months. Then the funeral. You flew from Odessa toward San Francisco, your first time in the city and only your third time in California. On a four-hour layover in Las Vegas, Micah sent you the homework. You read it and said, what is this? Then he sent you words from the book, and you realized you were reading about yourself.

You repeated your senior year. You and your high school sweetheart had a child. Her family did not believe in mixing. You fell behind on child support, a hundred dollars a month, eight or nine hundred behind. You met the woman who would be your wife, moved away, pawned everything for an attorney, and were facing extradition for evasion. Her family said they could raise her better. You signed your rights away thinking your tax refund would buy them back. It did not. Seven years. You would drive past elementary schools in San Antonio wondering which one was hers. Then her mother hit hard times, reached out to your wife, and your wife put the blended family back together. Your wife, it turned out, had cared for your daughter at a daycare before you ever met. Your daughter moved in with you. She is thirty-two now, about to graduate nursing school, and you find yourself defending her mother to her so she does not carry that bitterness into her own parenting.

You had a partial basketball scholarship at UTSA, tuition and books. You walked away from it for a young woman from a small town you had known six weeks, because she showed you something nobody had shown you before: compassion and love. You followed that. Her family, in that little town, taught you what choosing family means, how to be loved and supported and how to love and support back. Thirty years this year. Three children, twenty-six, twenty-eight, and thirty-two, all college graduates. You had the feeling family was important with no example of it. Now you have the example.

This is why "you can do everything about the family you start" made you say "I like that one" out loud.

Yours to hold if you want: the pro ball in Mexico, the student loans, the names of players you ran with. Not tonight's subject. No name-dropping.

Two grandchildren, eighteen months and three months. You caught yourself wanting to get back online, back to marketing, back to what money you might be missing, while your grandson just wanted you outside throwing the ball. That is the technology lesson and the fathers lesson in one picture.

Late on Wednesday you said it plain to a brother in the room: you discovered it here, because you do not feel whole, everybody says you have everything, and something is still not right. You may be educated, but you are still violent. You are not out. You are not free. You are alive, but your mind is still back there.